What Happens In The Dark
by OnlyVampiresCanLoveForever
Summary: This is Bella's untold story of those blank pages of New Moon. What to you do when you're in pure agony, and you can't even begin to describe the ammount or for how long you've waited for it to go away . . . or just get better? . . . . One-Shot. Rated PG.
1. Bella

**IMPORTANT READ:**'Kay, so this is the oh-so-great story I promised you. (And it's also a dare gone wrong, please before you report me for abuse, I was _dared_ to do this. I don't actually have suicidal thoughts, at all. So, I repeat, DON"T REPORT ME FOR ABUSE!) Now, before you start to say you absolutely hate it, let me just tell you what it _took_ to get this to you. First, I wrote this flippin' awesome story that was something like this, then I lost it. . . . . I never did find that story . . . . . So I just wrote it again, and it was pretty similar to the first one. A couple of months passed, and I got this fan fiction account. When I looked for the second one to put on here, I found out that I lost that one, too. Exasperated, I threw together that first story I put on my account, Dear Juliet, . . . ., (And now that I think back, it really was a crappy story.) Just so I could have_ somethin_g to put on my account. And today, when I was supposed to be paying attention in class, I decided to just write the whole thing out. I have to admit, all three copies where very similar. But then my BFF said that it needed more, so I added a bunch of stuff to it. Me and a few of my friends have read through it, and we think it still makes since with all of my 'improvements,' but if it doesn't make sense all of the way through, blame her, not me.

I awoke to the sound of my violent screams, again.

I was disoriented, until suddenly I realized where I was. I was on my bedroom floor, by my bed, the comforter wrapped around my mouth, muffling my screams. I looked around my room, and was hit with a fresh wave of pain when I realized it was empty, the moonlight shining in eerily from my lace curtains.

It has been like this for five months, five months since He left. Since he left everything abandoned, unwanted, forgotten . . . just like me.

Thank God the bed comforter was still around my mouth, it covered my next round of screaming hysterics. I gripped at my chest in an effort to stop the pain. The hole in my chest wouldn't stop ripping itself wider. The ripping, the burning, the pain, . . . it just wouldn't stop.

I eventually just gave up and began clutching at the sheets, preparing to ride the pain out.

I glanced at the clock, 1:25 a.m. If I had thought the pain was bad at the beginning, it was nothing compared to what it was now.

I clawed and screamed and cried for everything. For the loss of my very best friend, Alice, for the loss of the family that I had once found shelter in, for the loss of the entire life I had chosen, for me, for Him, and mostly for the love that was lost between us. The love that still lingered in a bittersweet and brutal aftertaste, and the love that I still carried with me, every single second of every single day, no matter where I went. The love that put in definition that my heart still does, and will until the end of time, belong to him.

Why had they left, anyway? Did Jasper feel guilty? Did he think that I hated him now, was that it? Had Alice forgotten to tell him my message? No, she wouldn't have forgotten. The only way she wouldn't have told him is if she chose not to, and she wouldn't do that. Would she? After all, I had also been sure that they wouldn't leave me, and I had been wrong about that. No, even if Alice didn't give him my message, there where others around when I said it, and they would have told him, if Alice didn't. But, did Jasper think I was mad at him? He was like my brother, how could he think that I didn't love him anymore? I still loved him just like I always have, and just as much as Emmett.

Thoughts like this where safe when the pain is at it's peak, they do nothing to help or hurt it, so I might as well try to distract myself with them. Though the truth is, I finally decided, that it doesn't matter why. Because, no matter the reason why, they're still gone.

When it finally ended, I looked at the clock, 1:26 a.m. One minute, that felt like hours.

By now the comforter was still wrapped around my mouth and my lungs where burning and my head was spinning from lack of oxygen. Though I couldn't take it off, not because it was stuck, but because I couldn't bring myself to. My hands wouldn't go up to touch it, they didn't _want _to. The twitching in my chest and stomach as my body desperately tried to pull in oxygen that was not there, the little voice in the back of my head that said, "If you don't pull that thing off_ now_, you won't be alive to!" I oddly found comfort in these things, as if they somehow promised relief from the pain that never fully went away, not even in my dreams. I wondered why, and the answer was obvious, but at the time, my oxygen-deprived brain couldn't put the pieces together.

I tried, to get my hands to move, but I found that I didn't _want _to, but I didn't know why. Then, when I realized why I actually liked it, I was instantly sick to my stomach.

How did this happen to me? I went from being happy, in love, to being . . . . suicidal. I shuttered at the word.

I quickly pulled the comforter off my face and panted in all the air I could get. Slowly, shaking, I climbed into bed and pulled the comforter/suicide weapon on top of me.

I was in for a long night. When my eyes started to close, I got scared.

My hand went to my bedside table, and I searched until my middle finger encountered the smooth coolness of the top of my radio. I turned it on. I wasn't in the mood for a happy song, a love song I was _definitely_ not ready for, and a song too sad could be dangerous, so what could I listen to? The DJ announced _Going Under _by Evanescence and I was greeted with "Now I will tell you what I've done for you, 50,000 tears I've cried. Screaming, deceiving, and bleeding for you, and you still won't hear me." It wasn't perfect, but it wasn't inflicting anymore pain than I was already in.

A few minutes later, it came on, the perfect song. _Breathe Into Me_ by Red was announced and "And this is how it feels when I ignore the words you spoke to me. And this is how I lose myself when I keep running away from you." began to play. I closed my eyes and drifted into a place where my blank nothingness provided comfort.

But as I drifted, I began to think. I thought about my life and how it would be written as a story. I eventually came to the conclusion that no one would read it, it's too boring and utterly depressing. Well, _now_ it is. Now that He is gone.

I didn't even have time to reach for something to cover my mouth with. Before I had fully even registered that it was there, the bloodcurdling shriek escaped from my body. My lifeless soulless, broken body. And I was glad that they gave me no warning now, I tired of fighting it anyway.

I probably woke Charlie up now. Not that I was hiding them before because I thought that he would be worried, he's used to it by now, I just didn't want to wake him up.

The music wasn't helping anymore. _Animal I Have Become _by Three Days Grace and I cut it off during "I can't escape this hell, so many times I've - " And, because I had been thinking of him, I was in too much agony to even think of sleep now, so I just laid there, to wait for morning.

I'm coming apart inside, and no one knows. If my mind is a dark ocean of secrets, my mind is a damaged hell-hole. I'm in pain and _no one_ can even begin to understand the extent of it. This is the kind of agony that only one person can cause, and the same person is the only one who can make it go away.

It's not_ just _referring to the night when the sentence that haunts me makes it's appearance: What happens in the dark are the most torturous things of them all . . . .

Again: DON'T REPORT ME FOR ABUSE!!! I'M FINE!!!!! Review: Like it? Hate it? Want rabid animals to abduct me for being Team Edward? TELL ME!!!!!

Here's a special treat. I was in class and I was getting bored (I told you I'm most creative when I'm bored.) so I was letting my mind wander and I thought this up. If you want me to continue, tell me. If I get enough good reviews I'll do it. This is in Twilight, after James, during Bella and Edward's first summer together

As we sat on the cliffs edge, the sun sinking beautifully over the horizon and unleashing magnificent streaks of reds, yellows, and everything in between over the crashing dark blue Pacific that reached up beneath us, hundreds of feet below.

I opened my mouth and spoke the words that where the reason I would freely die for him. "I love you." "As I love you." he replied. But he didn't look at me, he stared out to the sun, lost in thought. His face was hard, rigged, and I felt the need to look away.

I instead stared down at the forest green knitted blanket he had wrapped around me, and his muscular, pale stone arms he had placed protectively on top.

Finally, I couldn't resist, "Edward?" "Hmm?" . . . . "What are you thinking about?" He sighed. Then pulled my face up so that I was looking at him square in the eye and looked my face over to make sure I was listening to him.

What he said next shattered my blissful mood and made my world come crashing down . . . .

What did Edward say? I already have the idea that I based the story around, but if your ideas that are better and work with the story, then I'll go with which ever idea that I think is best! Review!!

P.S. If I finish this and post it as an individual story, it will be called What Do You Mean?


	2. Edward

**This is what was happening to Edward at the same time as Chapter 1 with Bella.**

I had no certain idea where I was, somewhere in South Brazil, just outside of a tiny village. I was walking along a soybean field, the stalks that looked just like wheat swaying in the breeze. I fought my mind with every microscopic speck of strength I had in me - sadly, not very much . . . since September - and I still lost the fight. The most confusing thing was, part of me wasn't even fighting, it _wanted_ to see her again. There was nothing I wouldn't give - aside from her very soul - to just see her one more time, smell her sweet, intoxicating scent, have one more stroke of her soft skin, see her smile. That was what I wanted most of all, to see her smile a truly happy smile. If I died today, that would be my only regret of not seeing one last time . . .

As the product of my failing to fight it off, images of Bella immediately filled my mind. If I couldn't control whether or not they came, at least I can control what they are. They set up like a slide show in my head. Just pictures, no sound. She had kept claim on so much of me when I left that that was almost the only control I had left on my mind, just to keep the sound away.

I recognized each one by associating it with a memory. I saw her lying down in the grass, the day I showed her our meadow for the first time. She was smiling in the next one, one of the many times she had come over to the house and Emmett and Jasper had been so absorbed in whatever new video game they where playing that they didn't notice her. When they looked up, became stunned and confused, and asked her how long she had been there, she always laughed. That's what the next one was of, her laughing. It took me a minute, but then I finally remembered what she was laughing at. It was Alice's birthday, and Bella had gotten her a pastel purple sweater for a present. Alice had loved it. When she asked where Bella got it, Bella responded, "The Second-Hand Shop. Where I buy all of your presents." The look on Alice's face was enough to send us all into a laughing frenzy. Only when Alice threw a fit did Bella tell her that she wasn't going to tell her where she bought all of her gifts, but that it was somewhere even an Alice would approve of. Alice looked as if she had just said, "No Alice, we're not going to die. That was a _fake_ grenade I just took the spoon out of." Which, of course, only sent everyone laughing again. Even Alice joined in, when she learned what it was about.

The pictures came in a constant stream as I walked along the far-stretching soybean field, so long that even_ I_ was having trouble seeing the end.

My subconscious, apparently mad that the previous pictures hadn't put me in enough pain to send me running home to Bella, decided that it was time to start torturing me. The next picture was Bella looking at me in the forest, her face crumpled in pain as she somehow appeared to be able to conceive the most blasphemous lie I had ever told. . . I let out an audible grunt of pain at that one. The one after that showed her with nothing but belief filling her eyes, along with the underlying pain, of course. I took comfort in the fact that the pain that filled her eyes was nothing compared to that of which I was feeling at the time. That the belief and sense that she understood why we where breaking up with her differed greatly from the heartache and confusion, the sense of being split right down the middle between two options that I wanted equally as much, that was raging in my mind.

To leave or to stay. They each had the same amounts of pros and cons. The biggest being: If I leave, I will cause myself unimaginable pain (I'm only beginning to realize how bad pain can get, still. Somehow, every day is more torturous than the last.) yet, I save her soul. I give her a chance at a normal, happy human life. If I stay, I continue into the blissful happiness that I was in before, that I'm always in whenever Bella's around, though I take from her everything. Her mother. Her father. Her friends. Children. To be able to grow old with her husband. To enjoy the sun and it's heat that she loves so much. . . How could I do that to her? Simple: I couldn't.

She must be over me completely by now, happy. I'll bet she doesn't even think of me anymore. She's probably counting down the time until she graduates, and when she does she'll be out of Forks as fast as she can. On to bigger and better places, and I'll never see her again. Or maybe not. Maybe she's already out of there, in Florida. She must miss her mother. Maybe she's not even in school anymore, maybe she dropped out. I can see that, it never was that important to her.

But, no matter where her life led her, I must remember one thing, if only one: She will be happier like this. None of my black demons can haunt her now, she can leave my past where it belongs now, with me. That's all that matters.

Maybe . . . maybe she's already moved on. I don't think she would . . . but what do I know? The images turned into the worst ones yet. Bella walking slowly with a man who's face kept changing, due to the fact that I didn't know what her type was. She had taken a blind chance on me, who knew what her regulations would be, now that she knew what she liked? I saw her walking slowly down a church isle on her father's arm, dressed in gauzy white. The images of her life with someone else flashed before me in my mind. In them, they where getting married, visiting their parents, growing old together. I was able to block them all out from every part of my mind except one microscopic piece in the very back. I tried to reason with myself that it wasn't real, just a figment of my imagination. I couldn't.

A picture reared up and took over every part of my mind, consumed it. It was one of Bella, smiling with the arm of her husband wrapped around her shoulders. That, though, wasn't what made it the most painful picture of all. It was the two small children - a boy and a girl - standing in front of them, obviously theirs, that gave it that title. Children. The one thing that I had wanted to give Bella more than anything. The biggest downfall of being a vampire, the cruel inability to produce them. Children.

I roared in agony. My clenched right fist swung around, trying to hit something, anything. There was nothing there for a few feet, so since the swing wasn't met with any resistance, I ended up spinning around thirty or so times.

I studied the earth around me as I was spinning, or at least I tried to. I was going so fast that the landforms around me - the rolling hills in the distance, the soybean stalks, the amber sunset - all mixed together in a large smudge of brown, even with my eyesight. As I was rotating, I realized that I wanted nothing more . . . than to run. Run away from her, from those images that wouldn't stop repeating themselves in my head, from the pain that was rearing so high over my head that I couldn't see the end of it, drowning me. Making me feel like I was surrounded by black, violent water, that wanted nothing more than to torture me until I was nothing but ash . . . I knew I couldn't outrun it, but I had to try.

I bought myself to a stop by planting my feet so firmly in the ground that it shook. I didn't worry about it, the people in the small village nearby would just label it as an earthquake, anyway. No one would ever suspect the real reason behind the shudder in the earth. . . I was at a standstill so fast that a normal human's neck would have snapped. My head was spinning, but not from motion sickness. I hadn't had the ability to fell motion sickness in almost a hundred years. It still swam from images of her filling my every particle, saturating my whole being. . .

I took off down the dirt road, going the same way I had been earlier when I was walking.

Hours, minutes. Seconds, years. Decades, centuries. I had no idea what any of them meant as I practically flew to anywhere my legs would take me. And that was okay. Why waste idle time on such meaningless concepts? Why do anything at all anymore? What was the point of participating in such monotonous thinking when I had just watched my world crumble around me, when I was the _reason_ it had crumbled? I sighed, I was rambling. Not that it mattered, any of it. Nothing mattered anymore, now that she was gone. Nothing. Once again, I caught myself before I started getting in too deep. I almost started to pull back, to try to focus on something else, but what would be the point? Why monitor my thoughts for the rest of my life? Why not just come to terms that not even my mind would be a safe place for me anymore? Oh, what the hell, why not? I let the undiluted despair I'd been fighting off for the past five months consume me. Overpower me. Devour me whole.

I found myself on a mountain peak, looking out into the distance at the field which I had just been walking through on the path that had stupidly been put directly down the middle.

The sun was going down, making everything around me a shade of blue. I'd say that it reflected my mood, but it wasn't quite there yet. My mood was black, black as pitch.

All the books, movies, and plays around the world claim that you eventually come to terms with the situation, with the understanding that you can never be with the one you love the most. That you eventually try to build back your life and you move on. Those who say that and those who believe that obviously have not loved as I have. I know that no matter how long I live, where I may go, and what I may do, I'll always be hers.

Anyone who has loved as I have, who knows the power of such a love, who has felt and hurt and been loved in return and experienced the intoxication of such an experience as I have knows the loss one feels as it is ripped violently from under him. Knows how the intensity of the pain can pale only in comparison of the intensity of your feelings for her. Knows what real torture is. Knows what it feels like to be in the middle of the most beautiful love story you've ever experienced, only to be faced with the cruel fact that not al stories have a happy ending.

Anyone who knows these things, these feelings, this awful knowledge, also knows what I mean when I say this: What happens in the dark, can sometimes be the most torturous things of all. . .


End file.
